Ever since her very first recital in the Salle Gaveau, Paris, nearly 40 years ago, Barbara Hendricks’ journey has been exceptional. Who would have thought that the little girl born in 1948 “with her feet in the mud of Arkansas” (to quote herself) would become one of the most emblematic singers of her generation and one of the most beloved by the general public? And yet that is what she did, traversing this half-century of history with an iron will and uncommon artistic purpose.

The history of music, to begin with. In this ‘Musical Portrait’, its outlines drawn up by herself, we discover the diversity of her many facets. Opera of course, oratorio, song, but also jazz and Negro spirituals: what could be more normal for this pastor’s daughter than to have kept in her repertory for all these years the roots of her childhood, the music she heard and sang in her father’s church. Barbara Hendricks has bestrode the world’s great stages for years, accompanied by some of the greatest chamber musicians, orchestras or conductors (Karajan, Giulini, Muti, Salonen, Barenboim, etc.).

It is, however, also History with a big H that Barbara Hendricks has lived through. As a spectator at first, having experienced when a girl the end of segregation in the southern United States, and having been one of the first black people to be admitted to the university – where she obtained a degree in mathematics, before taking up singing as a professional. As an activist subsequently: as an ambassador of the High Commissioner for Refugees, was she not one of the first artistes to put herself at the service of a humanitarian cause, taking advantage of her celebrity and her art unflaggingly since 1987 to spread the message of the suffering of refugees throughout the world?Of American origin, Swedish in her heart, French by adoption, Barbara Hendricks has no nationality: she is a free woman, one of those universal people who belong to the whole world, that everyone carries in a corner of his heart. This ‘Musical Portrait’ is much more than a compilation, for that which transcends the voice of Barbara Hendricks is the soul of a very great lady who has found in music the means to offer others the best part of herself.